Linda Weiss attributes the U.S. capacity for transformative innovation to the strength of its national security state, a complex of agencies, programs, and hybrid arrangements that has developed around the institution of permanent defense preparedness and the pursuit of technological supremacy.

Although economic explanations for the Great Recession have proliferated, the political causes and consequences of the crisis have received less systematic attention. This is the first book to focus on it as a political rather than an economic crisis.

Tomas Larsson argues that institutional underdevelopment may prove, under certain circumstances, a strategic advantage rather than a weakness and that external threats play an important role in shaping the development of property regimes.